


vampires

by arbitrarily



Series: cinematic parallels [2]
Category: Actor RPF, American Actor RPF, Canadian Actor RPF
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Infidelity, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-10 17:06:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10442838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: She can't track the metaphor.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, in the key of RPF, all lies, lies, lies. Also, I apologize for this taking so long to finish! LIFE, MAN. 
> 
> (Also x2, title comes from this one interview I watched way back in January that apparently has since been taken down off of YouTube??? Where she accuses him (and Damien Chazelle) of being emotional vampires who feed off her energy? Thanks for nothing, YouTube?)

 

 

well you could say it was so good it could not be understood  
which is just another way to say it was so weird it just doesn’t matter  
MOONFACE

 

 

**LONDON  
** **2017**

 

 

So here’s the thing: she has no idea what’s going on. That’s not her seeking out any sort of plausible deniability, but rather her being 100% refreshingly honest: she doesn’t know what the fuck is going on here.

Emma’s hungover the entire flight out from L.A. to Paris. She tucks her knees to her chest and sits upright; it’s the lone position she has discovered that’s keeping both nausea and the galloping headache behind her eyes at bay. That, and reruns of _Vanderpump Rules_ played at whisper-level volume. The bleeps are soothing. Sort of. 

She clutches the oversized headphones to her ears, like maybe this will keep her brain from leaking out her ears. Ryan’s across the aisle, and for all she knows he’s asleep or he’s dead or he too is listening with the same slavish distracted devotion to Lisa Vanderpump and all other heavily censored adjacent Vanderpumps. Actually, she’s not even really listening anymore but instead just repeating the name Vanderpump in her head like maybe this will unlock some higher level of consciousness. 

It doesn’t; she’s just hungover and soon she’ll be jet-lagged. Los Angeles to Paris to London. She’s fucking tired already. She had laughed at Ryan at LAX when he tried to spin his own hangover into some kind of legitimate sickness. 

“Fuck you,” she said. “You don’t get to do that.” He had laughed too, but it was a fake laugh, and whatever. If there’s anything terrible to gleamed from such a statement it’s that she’s well-versed in the art of differentiating a real laugh from a fake laugh when it comes to him. 

They hadn’t even gone to same Globes after-parties the night before. He ran off to hang out with Tobey Maguire and she of course had to say something like, “Oh sure, you prefer the OG Spider-Man,” or something a whole lot more mumbly mouth drunk that just made him squint all confused and not as amused as he should be at her. Which left her with her friends, and that’s cool, that’s fine, and she thinks Mr. Robot himself asked her for her number and she said something even dumber than the Spider-Man line about how shouldn’t he able to hack that information and he said, “Dude, that’s called acting,” like maybe she didn’t know that, and to be fair, the way she was talking kinda made it sound like maybe she didn’t know that, so cheers to you, Mr. Robot. She should check her phone; maybe he did hack her. 

You get it now that she's dropped the plot, right?

 

 

 

 

The last time they fucked it was November. It’s a new year now and the only time she’s touched him cameras were watching which is sort of like having a chaperone, so that’s gotta be progress. Or something. 

Nothing has happened for a long time, if she’s keeping tabs or being honest here. And if she’s learned anything from Ryan and if she’s learned anything from what they’ve done to each other, it’s to keep track of the score. 

But then they go to London.

 

 

 

 

They’re met with the same barrage of interviews in London that had greeted them in Paris. The same questions, the same answers, a new hangover. Paris a blur, but not in the cool old-school movie montage way or even their movie montage way. 

Emma’s slumped in an overly upholstered armchair waiting for the next interview to start. 

“What’s going on?” Ryan asks as he sits down in the chair opposite. She barely glances up at him, still scrolling through her phone.

“I’m really into soap right now,” she says after a long pause. “Like, those expensive bars of soap.”

“The fuck?” He sounds both annoyed and amused, so that’s something. She glances up at him now through her hair.

“You know, like those gourmet soaps. Gourmet’s not the word I meant, you’re not supposed to eat the soap. I don’t think? I wonder though, if you got yourself in a real _Lord of the Flies_ , Donner Party scenario, you’d probably eat the soap. But the lye,” she trails off and Ryan looks all the more confused for it. She puts her phone down on the table between them. “My brother’s girlfriend bought me a bunch last year for Christmas and I’m just now using them and I’m super into them.”

“What’s your brother’s girlfriend like?” he asks, leaning back in his chair.

“Well, she likes soap. So there’s that.”

“That’s a positive.”

The pause that stretches between them is awkward, like it doesn’t fit the space between them right. He’s looking at her so she’s looking at him. He’s got that look on his face like he’s smuggling a joke at her expense, and she hates that. She always wants to be in on the joke. 

“How are the kids?” she asks abruptly. She fixes him with a stare he returns with a bit too much eagerness. 

“They’re fine. Good, even.” She doesn’t trust the mischievous glint to him. “How are your kids?”

“Oh, they’re not fine. They are not fine at all.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I left them on the G Train the other day. I forgot I had them with me.”

“The fuck you doing on the G Train?”

“Leaving my nonexistent children behind.”

Now he’s got that smile he does where he’s trying to repress it but the rest of his face has already lit up with it so it tells even more about his amusement, that it’s something he feels he has to hide. He does that a lot with her. She thinks it’s called not wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt. Or applause. Or giving her anything at all she might be able to look back on later as proof of something. Anything.

“You didn’t tell me you were in New York,” he finally says. She doesn’t think that’s the right thing to take from this whole conversation, but she also doesn’t think she’s the right person to ask. 

“Well. You never asked.”

She can’t track the metaphors between them. The balls that are bouncing in courts and also probably out of bounds. Vampirism and parasites and who’s sucking who dry and for how long now until they’re gonna need a transfusion or at the least a better analogy. She can’t track the metaphors. She can’t track them.

“So,” Ryan says. “Soap.”

 

 

 

 

One of the first interviews they had done for the movie had been over the summer. She had dyed her hair blonde. 

“The fuck is this?” Ryan had said, joking and maybe not joking; sometimes she wondered what would happen if she went ahead and took everything he said seriously. What would he be then. She thinks the answer is, “a dick,” and that’s hardly surprising. He had palmed the back of her head, mussing her newly blonde hair, his fingers harsh and quick against her scalp and then he pulled away. 

“A crisis,” she said, and she was joking or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe that had always been her trick first.

 

 

 

 

“I don’t think I can get drunk anymore,” she says, apropos of nothing. They’re at the cocktail reception after the premiere or the screening or whatever they’re officially calling this. She’s reaching the bottom of her second glass of wine, slouched indelicately at the same small round table as Ryan. Her feet hurt. She wants to sleep for, like, an entire week.

“Why, think you’ve hit critical mass?”

“No, what? I mean, I don’t get drunk,” she says, gesturing with her hands a little too wide, or you know what, maybe just wide enough because this is a declaration. “I drink and I drink and I drink and then it’s just, wham, hangover. There’s no in-between.”

“No drunkenness?”

“Yes. No. I mean, yes, there’s no drunkenness. I mean, that’s the in-between and I’m not traveling it anymore and I miss it.”

“You still get drunk,” he says, dismissive, and it’s stupid because it stings. And she hates that. How he talks to her, at her, like he knows her. And he does, of course he knows her, and that’s why she hates it. She drains the rest of her glass of wine; it matches the shade of lipstick still mostly painted on her mouth. 

“You know what?” she says as she stands, the words drawled slow and confrontational. Like those old Hollywood actresses who made each line sound like it was dragged from her mouth against her will, a dollar sign bartered for each syllable behind the scenes. Ryan glances up at her with his own sort of reluctance. “I don’t have anything on underneath this dress.”

 

 

 

 

Rooney once told her that Ryan thinks because he’s a method actor it’s totally fine for him to trick himself and whoever he’s sharing the screen with to fall in love. It was after Texas, and Rooney never said Austin, it was always Texas, but the Texas Rooney talked about might as well have been L.A. 

“That’s a real mean thing to say,” Emma said but her voice was light.

“Why, because you’ve done it three times?” Rooney cracked a small smile, which was sort of the same thing as a full-on grin. 

“Did you?”

Rooney scowled. “Please.”

 

 

 

 

In cinema parlance, she thinks this is what would be called  THE BIG SET PIECE . They were always going to wind up in bed together again. That doesn’t make her, like, fucking Nostradamus, just logical. Pragmatic. Adult, even. She doesn’t need a fucking tarot deck or crystal ball or whatever to divine what comes next.

After the party, he follows her to her room. And she knew he would: the shape of obvious inevitability the night had taken on was basically a huge bright neon sign that should’ve spelled  DANGER! but instead spelled  THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN, ISN’T IT .

And it’s going to happen. Ryan stands too close to her in the elevator on the way up, but he doesn’t touch her. Kinda worse that way, she thinks, but it’s the sort of worse that makes a knot both tighten and unfurl inside of her, an anticipation so heady that she thinks if she was able to (because she can’t, that’s what she told him already) she could get drunk off it. 

He follows her into her room without a word. As always, his silence makes her that much more talkative, her mouth moving independent of the rest of her, yammering away about whatever. She’s not drunk, but she thinks for once she might be in the in-between again. That maybe the two of them have always been in the in-between and that’s the closest they’ll ever get to a name for this that she can live with. They haven’t invented a name for what it is when you care for someone but all you ever want to do is provoke them. Where you want them, but you don’t – you fear you no longer know them and they no longer know you and you can’t decide if it’d be better or the real worst-kind of worse to relearn each other. 

“This is very gentlemanly of you, you know,” she’s saying, one arm wrapped around her waist and the other bent at the elbow and raised. She’s standing in the middle of her hotel room and there’s the bed behind her and the door in front of them, and he’s right there in the middle with her, too. “Escorting a lady home. Maybe escort’s not the best word, you know. Considering. Hotels really are their place of business, I guess? Or at least it was in that one show I watched, where she was like, a law student? But broke? So she starts escorting, in hotels. Mostly.”

It’s unfair he still can make her nervous when she can’t do very much at all. His tie’s undone, his vest unbuttoned. He takes his jacket off and drapes it over the armchair. She thinks she’s still talking; there’s noise in the room and she assumes it’s her. 

“Take off your dress,” he says, and okay, that’s one way to shut her up. His tone is impatient but she wants to believe there’s something else there, so there’s something else there. She wants to be defiant, but she obeys him anyway. 

She wasn’t lying – she really doesn’t have anything on under her dress. There had been a whole godawful debate earlier with her stylist (via Skype) and her makeup artist (in her hotel room) about panty lines and getting the right line of silk against her body or what-the-fuck-ever, and now here she is: standing naked in that same hotel room, curious if they’d even be here if she hadn’t opened her mouth in the first place. Curious to know, if it isn’t here, then where. She thinks she knows what unfinished business feels like and she thinks it feels a lot like this.

He approaches her; her heart’s beating too fast. She feels like he should be able to see that. Maybe he can, maybe he can see right through her, because his hands are too gentle when he cradles her face. He’s still fully dressed and she’s completely naked, and whoa buddy, isn’t that just another fucking metaphor to add to the goddamned list. He smudges her faded lipstick off her mouth with his thumb. She leans into it. He tells her, low, that same tone he instructed her with before: “Get on the bed.”

She does. 

It’s not a comment on him if she’s always liked being the teacher’s pet. If she likes following direction. She likes to be liked, and the real problem with that is that he knows it.

Ryan barely touches her; the same thumb that smeared her lipstick tracks the wet seam of her – his touch too light to give her what she wants. Not a metaphor; a fact. Her hips lift, and she says his name, whining more than just a little. He pulls back, shaking his head. His licks his thumb, and what the fuck. 

“You don’t get to talk,” he says. She widens her eyes, her eyebrows lift. This is new.

“Oh yeah?” She leans back on her elbows, her legs still spread for him.

“Shut up,” he says but not unkindly. And she does. Silently, attentively, she watches him undress. He does it without hurry. And then, he’s naked, standing over her, also naked, the both of them weirdly careful and deliberate in the carriage of their bodies, still behaving as if they are being watched. And they are, if only by each other. One is always watching each other; they are each other’s most attentive audience. 

Emma doesn’t say a word. Not when he climbs on top of her, not when she’s finally under his weight. Not when his mouth opens over hers, kissing her with an eagerness she’s glad she lacks the capacity to even think about because she’s pretty sure it’d be a lot. Knows it, as they rut against each other, like he’s trying to prove some unnameable point to her. She doesn’t know what it is, but she does know she likes his mouth on hers, likes his body pushing too hard against hers. She likes his directionless anger.

She manages to even stay silent when he pushes into her. It’s this moment of bizarre stasis – too full, too fast, and she doesn’t think she’d be able to say anything even if she wanted to.

Emma finally breaks when he starts to fuck her – deep, just rough enough to feel unfamiliar. She breaks, she moans, loud, her head tipped back. That must be against whatever unmentioned rules they are abiding by here, because Ryan stops. He pulls out of her completely (she bites her bottom lip at the loss; knows better now than to say anything) and he glances down at her, eyes too dark. Her leg is lifted, her knee bent at his shoulder, and he slaps the curve of her ass. And she can’t help it. She laughs, throaty and surprised, still laughing even when he drops her leg and hauls her body against his. She doesn’t know what she’s laughing at; she thinks it’s him. 

She stops abruptly when he puts his hand over her mouth. She can’t explain it – it’s like the bottom of her just completely drops out. She’s that much wetter, clenching even as he tries to push back into her, and the equally helpless (because that’s how she feels – tired and helpless, to herself and to him) noise he makes is the most pornographic thing she thinks has ever heard.

“Emily,” he says, and no. He says it like her name is some kind of religious pronouncement and terrible epithet all at once. He says her name a lot now – Emily, her real name, all three syllables – and it always manages to sound both right and wrong in his mouth. Like a secret she forgot she shared; like she should’ve known better than to share anything with him.

The flat of his hand tastes hot and sweaty; she gasps beneath it, but is otherwise silent. She feels him still pushing against her, her body too strung-up and tense, open but unyielding. She hears the awful way he says, “Don’t come, don’t you come yet.” He’s watching her, his face too close, his fingers digging into her jaw, and he’s finally seated deep inside her. So, this is happening. She pulses around him, still at that tipping point between coming and not. He dips his head, mouths at her temple, his grip slackened around her mouth as he grinds against her, his palm slipping down her jaw, fingers barely covering her slack mouth. He says something about her being so good (and why does she need that? why does she – ), and before she can do more than whimper a little, she sucks the tip of his finger. She feels him groan before she hears it, the rumble of his body against hers, and quiet, she’s being quiet, but all she wants to do is beg him to let her come, beg him to make her, beg him because there’s nothing he can’t make her do, there’s nothing he can’t do to her, she’d do anything, anything he wants – doesn’t he know that?

He has to know that.

She has two of his fingers in her mouth and she sucks hard, likes how his body jumps, the answering jolt of her own. It’s a role reversal: he’s the talkative one now that she’s not. She wonders if he knows what he’s saying, wonders if that matters. He’s hilariously filthy, but there’s also nothing funny about it, nothing funny about him telling her how he’s going to fill her up, how good and tight she feels, how good she is, she’s so good for him. This would be the part of her memory she tells herself will go on to be a redacted part of her own personal history while knowing better: she will call up the words and his mouth and this moment all the time and if and when recalling this – his words, his mouth – brings her nothing bodily in return she will know that whatever this chapter of their lives has been is over.

He pulls his fingers out of her mouth, wet and dripping, barely moving inside her, and he traces wet fingers down around her cunt, where it’s spread around his cock. She’s over-sensitized. His other hand pulls at her hair, tips her head back. He kisses her and then he talks against her mouth, her hands grabbing at him.

“Tell me,” he says, his mouth against her mouth. “I wanna hear you.”

The only thing she finds she can say is stupid and strangled and wordless as she tries to arch under him. She needs more, she needs to come, she’s always going to need more. 

“Fuck me. Fuck me,” she pants. He moves his hand to grip her hip. And he does; he fucks her.

“Tell me,” he says again, more insistent, and she doesn’t know what he’s asking her, she doesn’t know what he wants her to say. But she can’t shut up now, babbling, her voice all broken, and then it’s just his name, and then, shaking, thighs trembling, she’s silent.

This was always going to happen, she thinks dimly, his body heavy on top of hers. They’re only following the script. 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes she thinks Ryan’s too opaque to be anything real. That Rooney was right. It’s all method, all tricks. All performance. That she’s as responsible for this as he is because she invented him. This version of him. She met him when she was too young not to know how not to want and she never got smarter; she knew people changed but never thought that could apply to him even as he did just that: change.

But then, so did she.

 

 

 

 

They sleep in the same bed. She has to get up to meet Andrew for lunch. She says it out loud, unsure why, but she thinks it sounds like a stage direction. She doesn’t look to see if Ryan’s still asleep.

He’s not. 

He watches her get dressed, half-slit eyes; she catches his gaze in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, and it’s dumb, it’s so dumb, how that makes her chest go tight, her heart feel all Grinch post-revelation, three sizes too large for the bones that hold it in. Another dumb metaphor.

“Where are you going?” he asks, the question mumbled, barely audible.

“I told you. I’m meeting Andrew.”

“Andrew,” he repeats, but it’s muffled by the pillow. 

“You can stay,” she says, when she has her coat on, purse slung over her shoulder. Ready. “If you want.”

He only grunts. She pauses before she goes. She feels like she’s failed a test here and she resents him for even making her feel that way, intentionally or otherwise. She glances back at him when she’s at the door. It’s too dark to tell if he’s watching her. She goes. 

 

 

 

 

So she gets lunch with Andrew. 

So she’s not going to get back together with him and she’s never going to be with Ryan. So she acts like there are only two men in the world and she can’t pick either one. 

 

 

 

 

“You love him. Ryan.” That was what Rooney had said and she had shaded it as an accusation, lending his name bite.

“Of course I do. You’re not paying attention.” Emma shook her head. “I’m no good for anything else.” A laugh. “And I’m not even very good at this.”

 

 

 

 

Emma comes back to an empty room. The bed made. Like he’d never been here. It’s better this way. Probably. 

She had imagined it, though – coming back to him, still asleep in her bed. Or awake, sleepy and waiting. For her. She likes to imagine him waiting, as if all of this could hinge on her and her decisions rather than his. She would crawl into that bed with him, and she would stay, too. She would wake up beside, pressed against, his body again. She doesn’t know if they’ve ever done that before. She doesn’t think they have. Maybe at first, but that was a long time ago and they must have been different people then. 

 

 

 

 

The airport, Emma alone this time. 

Waiting for her flight. The quiet, the bad coffee. Headed back to L.A., and if there’s any place to travel to alone, she thinks it should be Los Angeles.

“You could stay,” she had said, and Jesus Christ, when is she ever gonna learn? When’s she ever gonna get smart. She watches out the window for the plane to hit the tarmac. Her nails are chipped and when she crosses her legs her thigh muscles twinge. When’s she gonna realize some things just don’t ever come to you. She waits. 

 

 

 

 


End file.
